Tuesday April 29 — New UDM employees on this list
It took me 5 months to figure out that this list does not automatically include new UDM employees. It’s not hard to include people but I didn’t think to ask IT about it. This morning there are c. 120 new people receiving this post bringing the total number to 1576. Sorry for this lapse; hospitality is about including people. You are welcome on the list.
A couple thoughts come to mind about that welcome this late April morning alive with spring rain.
1) The way this list is designed, you will receive the work day posts most, but not all, work days (sometimes I don’t get time to write)
2) If you want to browse earlier posts, go to https://sites.udmercy.edu/poetry Every post lands at the top of the archive on the day it is posted and the first ever post {September 25, 2013} is at the bottom. You can browse a month at a time and you can search by any word (e.g., an author’s name).
3) A few UDM employees have asked to be removed from the list. It’s very easy to do that, email me if you don’t want to receive the posts.
These end of year days at the university remind me of how hard people work. End of term is a time of fatigue, a good time to pause and breathe a little while and allow ourselves to recognize our beauty. Rabindranath Tagore in #49 imagines God giving each of us “a flower for a prize.” Our fatigue is a mark of the beauty of our commitments.
Have a good day; enjoy spring rains.
john st sj
Today’s poem Rabindranath Tagore Gitanjali # 49
You came down from your throne
and stood at my cottage door.
I was singing all alone in a corner, and the melody caught your ear.
You came down
and stood at my cottage door.
Masters are many in your hall, and songs are sung there at all hours.
But the simple carol of this novice struck at your love.
One plaintive little strain mingled with the great music of the world,
and with a flower for a prize you came down
and stopped at my cottage door.
Tagore died in the city of his birth, Calcutta, in 1941. He vastly influenced poetry, sacred and secular, not only in India but around the world. He is the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913. If you buy Gitanjali, a book of 100 short sacred poems, prepare yourself to only read one poem at a time so you can sit with it. Here is # 1. The poems have no titles, only numbers.
